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Where we came from to get here

Okay, it's party time in Tiny Town. Welcome to the Olympics, each and every one of you.
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Okay, it's party time in Tiny Town. Welcome to the Olympics, each and every one of you. It's good to see all of you who've been here before and for those of you who are visiting Whistler for the first time I'd like to take this opportunity to ask, "What gives?" Jeez, we have to put on the freakin' Olympics to get you here? Talk about hard to please.

But regardless of how hard you are to please, we've done what we had to do to lure you here. After all, hosting the Olympics is why Whistler was built in the first place. No, really. Way back in 1960, a group of Vancouver businessmen were hanging out, drinking beer and watching the Winter Games in Squaw Valley - since renamed Native American, First Nations Woman Valley - when one of them said, "Hey, why don't we host the Winter Olympics."

The others, not believing their ears, said, "He's cut off," to the bartender, who was about to stand them to another round. Undeterred, the romantic fool whipped out a cocktail napkin - the '60s version of PowerPoint - and sketched out a strategy for holding the Olympics in Vancouver.

There was only one flaw in the vision quickly taking shape. While Vancouver is blessed with a thriving harbour and lovely mountains, it is not visited by what Real Canadians proudly call winter. I believe the current conditions on Cypress speak forcefully to that point and those of you with a keen grasp of history may remember the 1960s were a time before freestyle, snowboarding and anything-cross, a time when alpine events required real snow.

"Okay, so we'll find another mountain to hold the skiing events on," said the dreamer. "It's not like we have to go very far to find mountains around here." More prescient words were never spoken. With only enough money left over for a single tank of gas in a single-engine Cessna, the search was on. Whistler Mountain - then named London Mountain - was found, the group landed safely back in Vancouver and the rest is history.

While the history of the town of Whistler is both brief and contemporary, there are militant members of the museum board who would beat me with ski poles if I failed to pay homage to all that came before, what those of us with short-term memory problems like to refer to as The Before Time. Therefore, a brief history to placate them is in order.

In the beginning there was a single land mass called Pangea. While it's not impossible to locate Whistler on a map of Pangea, it is pointless. With the exception of tectonic forces, continental drift, dinosaurs and the fracturing of Pangea into what we like to think of today as continents, nothing much happened for the next 250 million years. So we'll just skip that part. It won't be on the test.

Long before there were condos, the First Nations peoples arrived... first. Ironically, that's why they're called First Nations. Makes sense when you think about it. Of course, they just called themselves The People. It sounded different though since they didn't speak English.

The People were members of the Xit'olacw tribe and they lived in what is now Whistler. Naturally, they didn't call it Whistler. I'm not sure they called it anything, but they ran a thriving ski resort for members of the surrounding tribes and had handsome lodges on the banks of Green and Alta Lakes, for which they also had different names.

These peaceful, industrious, original inhabitants were, of course, brutally run off by White, European settlers who, being unable to pronounce Xit'olacw, called them by the then popular name, Savage Indians. Being a forward thinking race, the White Men banished The People to inferior land further up the valley and immediately turned Whistler into a garbage dump. It was their way.

Nothing much changed until the early part of this century when Alex and Myrtle Philip settled into the abandoned native lodges on Alta Lake and founded Rainbow Lodge and Myrtle Philip Community School. They put Whistler - it still wasn't called Whistler, Alex just reused the sign on Alta Lake and named the town that - on the map as a World Class fishing resort, ranked number one in North America for many years running by Field and Stream and other popular fishing magazines. This feat was all the more amazing when you consider getting to Whistler at the time was roughly akin to hacking your way through tropical rain forest.

By the late 1950s, it was pretty clear the future of fishing in Alta Lake was limited. The problem wasn't global warming, which hadn't been invented yet; the problem was over fishing. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the archival photographs of happy fisherfolk and their strings of dead fish in the museum. Be careful what you say though, you might get smacked with a ski pole.

That pretty much brings us back to the Vancouver businessmen and their crazy Olympic dream. I won't bore you with the squalid details of how Whistler Mountain was financed and birthed in those early years but I will tell you the first time this dedicated group of wide-eyed dreamers approached the IOC with a bid for the Winter Olympics - 1968 if memory serves - they weren't successful. Not wanting to cast aspersions on the Masters of the Rings, let's just say the first bid was a bit light.

Rejected and dejected, Whistler's forefathers did what any good businesspeople do when they can't do what they want. They did something else. That would have been the end of Whistler; but it wasn't.

Fortunately, the nascent ski resort with the big mountain had attracted a small but dedicated group of drug-crazed hippy-jocks who realized they could probably lure people to Whistler to ski and buy tie-dyed T-shirts from them if only they could find a surefire marketing hook. In their more lucid periods they also appreciated that once the place really took off they could sell these same people real estate, thus assuring themselves a comfortable, expansive middle age. Which they did.

The hook? Humongous terrain, scary steeps, limitless Wet Coast Powder and Whistler's official mascot, B.C. Bud, a tall, lanky fellow with wild green dreadlocks. Word spread like wildfire in the draft resistance underground of the U.S. and, well, the rest is history... sort of.

And now, after several other attempts, Whistler is hosting the Olympics. Who would ever have imagined? Okay, so everyone imagined, but you understand what I'm getting at, eh?

Welcome to my town. Have a good time, use the bear-proof garbage cans - ask a local if you can't figure them out - and if there's anything we can do for you, don't hesitate to ask. It's all about you. No, really. But then, you knew that, didn't you?